Posts by bemusedHorseman

BOFH: HR's AI hiring tool is perfectly unbiased – as long as you're us

What's an antimemetics division?

Just be careful not to call it COLORLESS GREEN instead, that's how you end up on the SCP-3125 project...

Junior techie rushed off for fun weekend after making a terminal mistake that crashed a client

Ah yes, Wrong Window Syndrome... Are you truly an I.T. Guy™ (gender neutral) if you haven't done something like this at least once?

Man who binned 7,500 Bitcoin drive now wants to buy entire landfill to dig it up

Re: Twist In The Tale

I guessed similar, but that it's the city council that has it. Either way, Lead Pipe Legilimency will be required to get the password...

BOFH: Engage Hollywood Protocol – because nonsense always looks legit

Excuse you, "plagiarism" is such a dirty word. Around here, we prefer to call it...

DIGITAL HALLUCINATIONS!

(...yeesh, alternating-caps-and-italic is much easier to write in markdown instead of html...)

Microsoft quietly erases Windows 11 TPM 2.0 bypass workaround from help page

Re: As long as they don't remove the workaround

...Until they decide to weaponize the processor allowlist. "Hold the phone, our records show that your processor is approved for the upgrade, meaning it does have a TPM... so just sit tight while we factory reset your BIOS settings and get you upgraded, and while we're at it, we'll replace your system login with the Microsoft Account credentials you signed into Minecraft with once, deleting all the data in your Local Account user directory in the process." *holds gun to user's head* "Now publicly thank us if you don't want to be dash-nined along with your family."

Icon because I legitimately would not be surprised if all of that (minus the lead poisoning) actually comes to pass in October ->

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Re: There is no reason for Windows 11

Arguably, a marketing team telling you at gunpoint to upgrade, is itself a reason not to upgrade.

Microsoft to force Windows 11 24H2 on Home and Pro users

Re: self-defense

I did this day one, no problems. Anticipating a sneak attack in October though, "hold up, your CPU is on the Windows 11 install allowlist, you do have a TPM you lying BOFH, force upgrade activated"...

BOFH: Forecasting and the fine art of desktop upgrades

Re: Great start to a new year of BOFH

I have a larger stack size (due to not being management), and even my bum hurts from that part...

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

"You said hmm again!" "Did I? Sometimes I say hmm instead of sweet mother of holy @#$&..."

Microsoft flashes Win10 users with more full-screen ads for Windows 11

Re: Updates

Can confirm, I'm a gaming content creator and I recently saw a video about "why don't creators use linux?". I had no idea how hobbled the Linux version of Davinci Resolve is, due to (what else) codec licensing crap. After watching through, even if I only played games with native Linux ports, 80% of my creation workflow would be nearly unusable simply due to the tools not being feature-parity with their Windows versions...

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Re: Sometimes there's a hidden benefit with irritating clients

I'm thinking it's more in a sense of liability, that if the reactor decides to "turn soviet", at least the work logs show it wasn't their hand that had been on the tool during that project.

Microsoft veteran ditches Team Tabs, blaming storage trauma of yesteryear

Re: One word: Python

Technically, the Python spec allows either, as long as you use one and only one indentation method in a given file. Mix them up, and the interpreter (rightfully) commits kill-dash-nine.

BOFH: We send a user to visit Kelvin – Keeper of the Batteries

How doers don't get more done

Home Depot employee here, the real threshold is six for there to be a reasonable expectation we actually have an item in stock. And when checking another store, if the internal inventory app doesn't say at least ten, I'll advise to just order it online instead.

Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many

Re: Somehow became corrupted?

"I'm the only one I know with a less colorful vocabulary than Beetle Bailey."

Techie made a biblical boo-boo when trying to spread the word

Personally, I find the RICH, CHUNKY VOLTS of an inverter disguised as a luggable (Tradeshows 19:98, or thereabouts) to be far more effective.

Windows 11 continues slog up the Windows 10 mountain

Re: It isn't just apathy, it is active avoidance.

When my current rig was brand new straight out of the Amazon boxes, I went into the bios settings and disabled TPM before I even let my Win10 install media get anywhere near it. May as well use their hardware insistence against them, with a glorious "This device cannot run Windows 11" right in the system info panel.

Try and "upgrade" me against my will now, MICROS~1 (see icon ==>)

Body of IT tycoon Mike Lynch recovered after superyacht sinks

Find an exit quickly, 47!

Oh come on, not even IOI would write a plot that cockamamie for a Hitman mission, and that series got away with some seriously lolrandom plots...

Microsoft patches scary wormable hijack-my-box-via-IPv6 security bug and others

...I also have Win10 Pro, and on the last update check I told it not to check again until mid September.

It did an update check this morning regardless.

I guess certain updates can be flagged as "bypass user update deferral and download now", and MICROS~1 deemed this particular Patch Tuesday as worthy of a bypass?

GitHub rolls back database change after breaking itself

Take your bets!

Which was it this time? Was it DNS? Wrong window syndrome? Regex gone wild? Far fingered an rm -rf? Or did someone forget to pay the onion bhaji tax to the local BOFH???

How to maintain code for a century: Just add Rust

Re: but no FOSS package ever dies

"A merge conflict?! You shall now face the mighty wrath of ZIIIIIM!"

"Time to sing the doom song! Doom doom doom..."

There is no honor among RAM thieves – but sometimes there is karma

Re: CPU in wrong...he forced it in

Jeremy Clarkson, is that you?

Amazon Labor Union votes overwhelmingly to join forces with Teamsters in NYC

"Unplanned emergency permanent closure" of JFK8 in three, two, one...

BOFH: An 'AI PC' for an Acutely Ignorant user

Re: Virtual coloured penclis?

Not to be confused with the machine that goes ding when there's stuff, that one's a bit too timey-wimey for this application...

Microsoft gives Windows admins a break and MFA a hard push

Re: MFA doesn't make things secure.

> I am so, so tired of the "but everyone has a smartphone!" crowd.

The part that really grinds my gears, is people that assume you can do everything with your phone. I keep running into places that refuse to let me pay... with a physical card, they only accept payment through their store app even in person.

Not everyone is willing, or allowed, to install an app and become on a legal first name basis with every little mom and pop store they go to, never mind the big McMegacorps! The other day, I got stuck in a drive thru with a huge line of honks behind me because the cashier refused to take my order without me providing a loyalty app code! (To the manager's credit, they read that cashier the riot act for holding up the drive thru for 15 minutes like that...)

Cisco's emergency caller can send first responders to the wrong location

Yes XOR no. Basically, it comes down to the fact that cellular triangulation requires a certain number of towers, the same way that GPS only works if you have line of sight to at least four satellites, increasing in precision with more of them. When you call 911, the system looks up the source phone number to see if it's a landline; if it is, the street address is right there and it's assumed that you're calling from that address, making it easier to dispatch to you. If it's a cell number... it has to check the signal-distance to multiple nearby towers, but in a rural area, you might only have one. "The mobile phone with number 123-555-1234 is in a 1.612 kilometer radius of Tower WZZZ, and in range of no other towers" isn't usable at all, while "The landline with number 456-555-7890 is registered to 123 Main Street, Anytown, CA 90210" is actionable.

........of course, in theory this is the exact reason Emergency Services' scripts now begin with "what is your location" and then asks what the emergency is, but if all you were able to do was dial before Something Terrible Happened, all 911 has available is whether or not the number you're calling from is tied to a physical address, or if you're in an urban enough area for the required number of towers to geolocate you.

...See, this is why rural zip codes in my state are required by law to still have a traditional landline (whether it's POTS or VOIP doesn't matter, it just has to be "a phone number physically tied to a street address"), in order to still get emergency services.

Hey, Reddit. Quick question. All those clicks on my ads. Were they actually real?

Seems real to me?

Considering almost every ad I see on reddit has been downvoted into oblivion, I assume most impressions the ads get are from real users... Bots would be told to upvote the ads to see them more often and click them more.

BOFH: Smells like Teams spirit

Can confirm, a lot of people go out of their way to wait until they know it will inconvenience you, before making contact (and then it ends up as something stupid anyway).

Encrypted email service files DMA complaint claiming it vanished from Google Search

Funny enough, this is legitimately the "origin story" of the Acme company name (and there were many of them!), long before it became Looney Tunes Amazon...

Senate passes law forcing ByteDance to sell off TikTok – or face a US ban

"Only" a little tingle?

If I were them, I would've made sure Zuck - and Musk, and all the other "tech bros" - had permanently implanted >KZERRTT!< generators hooked up to their wedding vegetables...

Unintended acceleration leads to recall of every Cybertruck produced so far

Tesla screwed up? OH NO!

Anyway...

Snowmobile, Amazon's truck-powered migration service, reaches the end of the road

That's a shame, I'm in the middle of studying for my AWS Cloud Foundations cert and just learned about Snowmobile this morning. How else are you supposed to "FedEx a shoebox full of hard drives" on petabyte scale now? :'(

BOFH: The new Boss, Aiman, is suspiciously good – for now

Re: Esperanto and Non-Mutating Grammar

Yup. Even languages that have official academies that dictate What Is and What Cannot Be (French, and to a lesser extent Castillian Spanish), dialects will always happen (Quebecois French, every Spanish that isn't Spain Spanish). ...In fact, you could argue the reason Esperanto hasn't taken off (besides its lack of intrinsically-bound identity and culture besides "look at me learning this language"), is because of the stiff-upper-lip approach to following Da Rules™. It's a noble idea, creating a language that can be anyone's second language regardless of their first language... but until there's a critical mass of people for whom Esperanto is their birth language, it'll always remain a niche.

Re: Esperanto? That's for rookies

Well, he definitely swears in suomi when he sees bad pull requests on the LKML.

Semi-related fun fact: Lithuanian is one of the few languages to not have expletives as a general language feature. If you're in Lietuva and you need to curse, mówisz po polsku, kurwa!

Esperanto? That's for rookies

Aiman should have suggested the company learn Finnish instead. "Modern computing society rests on the back of a single Finn", and all that. Plus it's a fun language to swear in, surely a benefit for Simon. Perkele!

US broadband internet: Now with mandatory 'nutrition' labels

Do they also have to disclose "network management" policies, like how Comcast considers the entire bittorrent protocol to be "intrinsically illegal, with no legitimate use cases since it's only used for piracy" and will terminate your service for using even software that piggybacks on it (Windows 10's updater in default configuration uses it for P2P sharing of update data)?

Seriously, if you're a Comcast user, try downloading a Linux ISO (completely legal content in every sense of the word) using your favorite torrent client (VPN or not, it doesn't matter, they can see the "torrent shaped" packets even inside a VPN tunnel even if they don't know what or with whom you're downloading), and wait for the "you do that again and we'll terminate you... as well as your subscription" email.

US Air Force secretary so confident in AI-controlled F-16s, he'll fly in one

...No, I'm pretty sure this was an episode of Code Lyoko and I don't want it to happen in the real world. (I think it was also a Stargate Atlantis episode...)

X fixes URL blunder that could enable convincing social media phishing campaigns

Re: All is good

Better still, Error 732: Fucking Unic&#128169;de.

If I had a jellybean for every time a popular website had a domain-squatting risk due to an API with a half-ascii'd autoreplace issue creating arbitrary URLs, I would have two jellybeans. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice this week.

https://corporateclash.net/news/article/153

https://sheriffcranky.substack.com/p/datadog-has-a-security-footgun

Tough luck, bosses, AI is coming for your job, too

Re: AI replacing bosses - irony

I'll believe it when PointyHairedBoss.EXE is able to be as entertaining as its existing Mk1 wetware counterpart.

"Stupid fruit! ...Best 3 out of 5!"

Ex-White House CIO tells The Reg: TikTok ban may be diplomatic disaster

Yup. Thanks to Play Protect, Google can remotely tell all Android devices "if you see an APK with the following hash, whether it was installed from the Play Store or sideloaded, immediately uninstall it without warning the user". It's intended to only nuke actual malware, but they've used it in the past to enforce the Google Graveyard™ for apps they've killed... such as Google Play Music, which to this day requires some spicy workarounds to be able to sideload a pre-killswitch version, even on a rooted device.

Microsoft, OpenAI may be dreaming of $100B 5GW AI 'Stargate' supercomputer

Re: Correction

It might require a velocity relative to the nearest gravity well rather than absolute position in the universe. Like how the time jump gear from MIB3 required falling at terminal velocity, a relative acceleration of zero compared to the earth, in order to do the time warp...

Twitter's lawsuit against anti-hate-speech crusaders gets SLAPPed out of court

Re: Costs

You misspelled "The Birds-Aren't-Real App".

Re: ... the lawyers ... should be referred to the CA State Bar for potential disciplinary action

I continue to very blatantly call them what they are and always have been, tweets, because I know it pisses the musky one off.

BBC exterminates AI experiments used to promote Doctor Who

You will be upgraded, resistance is futile

Funny enough, there legitimately was a "Who Trek" crossover comic at one point, titled Assimilation², revolving around a cross-dimensional teamup between the Borg and the Cybermen... eventually going very, very wrongly for the former (Cybermen have no organic matter to be Borgificated, but Cyberization works just fine on the Borg). So the Doctor has, canonically, been on a Starfleet vessel at one point.

BOFH: So you want more boardroom tech that no one knows how to use

"How many of you have seen Tron?"

"If someone attempts to log you out by removing your NerveGear, well... has anyone seen Scanners? ...Seriously?! Okay, here we go, one sec, watch this..."

*clip of head exploding*

"Okay, that was from Scanners... and basically that."

Re: Make It Happen

Well, that would upgrade the laptop from digital hazmat (keep it airgapped and fdisk from orbit) to biological hazmat (to the incinerator with it, wear gloves)...

BOFH: I get locked out, but I get in again

Re: Nothing on one...

Advantage, BOFH. He doesn't have the constraint of needing to remain 100% covert. If something isn't worth keeping stealthy for, out come the power tools!

Health system network turned out to be a house of cards – Cisco cards, that is

"Jack in! BlizzardMan.EXE, Execute!"

Willy Wonka event leaves bitter taste with artificially sweetened promises

I mean, they could have at least used live AI generation to make the boat scene, that at least would have felt screen accurate...